Intellectual capital: from intangible assets to fitness landscapes

Intellectual Capital (IC) has been proposed by Edvinsson and Malone (1997) as a technique for quantifying a company's intangible assets. A careful analysis can result in hundreds of variables, and extracting knowledge from these measurements can be difficult. We introduce a knowledge management technique called IC mapping that attempts to synthesize this data into a fitness landscape. Using the map, managers can query the surrounding landscape, view past progress as a trajectory across the landscape, and calculate what parameters need to be changed to reach new locations. IC mapping provides a novel knowledge management tool for understanding, managing, and representing a company's intangible knowledge assets.